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Comment by WD-42 | Hacker News Reader

I really miss the days of being able to use pidgin to talk to everyone

These days I can't even use pidgin for xmpp, because the omemo plugin is too wonky. Now someone I'm sure will say I'm just holding it wrong and that may be so.. but I doesn't work for me despite trying for a reasonable amount of time to get it working.

And regarding other protocols I'm too scared these days. Every company is running algorithms looking for deviants to perma-shadow-ban and I just can't risk something like that.

The problem here is that Pidgin's development didn't manage to keep up with the changing times. Stable branch is 10-15 years behind XMPP features. The developers are working on a Pidgin 3.0 (rewrite?) but that still has quite some way to go.

Unfortunately Pidgin was one of the most popular ways to use XMPP back in the day, and this had a knock-on effect on XMPP's reputation as an out-of-date technology. People still install Pidgin today and tell me, yep, XMPP hasn't changed since 2006. Which couldn't be further from the truth.

Was it that pidgin didn’t keep up with features, or more likely that one by one the major platforms pulled xmpp support to the point where there was no reason for a normal person to use pidgin?

It was both, and part of the reason platforms pulled support is that keeping up with XMPP was bad ROI.

You're Facebook. You want to provide an instant messenger you can iterate on quickly. You can put the work into making it XMPP-shaped and working with the community (whatever they means... Are you going to slip ship targets because Pidgin doesn't work as a client for your implementation?). Or you can just write and ship your own service and client at your own pace and not care about any other developer's needs or wants because you're trying to serve Facebook users, not developers.

There were never any major platform with good XMPP support except for Google Talk anyway. So not sure about "one by one".

Facebook? Or was that something else. All I remember is a golden age when between google and Facebook I had like 90% of my non work contacts available to chat with on pidgin. And my work used xmpp internally, it was glorious.

Facebook had a poorly maintained gateway into their chat system which spoke XMPP c2s (no federation). Was pretty much a hack to get people to stop asking for a Linux client until the web app became the only desktop option anyway.

Sorry Mattj, but thank you for saying these things kindly :)

It's true Pidgin 2's XMPP support sucks, there's no denying that. That said we can't easily fix that with the current API which is why Pidgin3/Purple3 is the only path forward.

That said, I'm pushing to have an experimental release of Pidgin 3 out by the end of the year. However it's only going to have IRC support right now because well there's only so many hours in the day especially when Open Source is your passion project and not your day job.

> These days I can't even use pidgin for xmpp, because the omemo plugin is too wonky. Now someone I'm sure will say I'm just holding it wrong and that may be so.. but I doesn't work for me despite trying for a reasonable amount of time to get it working.

The libpurple (library behind Pidgin) support for xmpp is quite mediocre so it's not that you're holding it wrong.

Dino is great on Linux. There's an unofficial windows build that might or might not work. If it doesn't, then Gajim is "fine." Conversations is great on Android. I think Monal is the current best on iPhone, but I don't own an iPhone.

And the need for the existence of the above paragraph is, IMO, a big part of why XMPP isn't used. Nobody knows which clients to use, and the experience if you use an out-of-date client is terrible (seriously, emojis don't work between Psi (which is still listed on xmpp.org as a client, and was a great client 15 years ago) and Dino.

We're still here and we're getting close to finally getting a pre alpha Pidgin 3 out the door. In the mean time check out https://pidgin.im/plugins for third party plugins that provide at least basic support most of the modern protocols.

I’ve see you stream pidgin 3 development on twitch. Keep up the good work!

Man Pidgin used to be excellent for Steam and Facebook Messenger for me.

I no longer use Facebook Messenger, but I really miss the Steam plugin (its been busted for years at this point)

Haha yeah. Within Pidgin I used ICQ, XMPP (over my own VPS), Skype, Facebook messenger, ...

Now I have to use different apps for Signal, Element, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Telegram, ...

Facebook via xmpp was the last thing Facebook was good for. It was nice to be able to strike up the occasional conversation with an old school friend or acquaintance. It really does feel like everyone is online more than ever yet somehow more isolated.

I can recommend beeper! I don't use it for encrypted messengers because I don't want to accidentally leak incoming messages that were sent with the expectation of e2ee. But it's great for catching a few of the odd ones.

Beeper (built on matrix) has convenient bridges to lots of services. You can use the hosted service or self-host (https://github.com/beeper/bridge-manager) or you can host plain matrix using https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy/

"plain matrix" sounds a bit wrong - we put great effort into maintaining numerous of components of the playbook, including bridges, so it has a lot to offer. Alternatively, you can just get a managed server on https://etke.cc

Disclaimer: I'm Aine of etke.cc, and MDAD is our project

I'm sorry, bad choice of words. I didn't mean to imply that it's worse in any way. I use it myself. Uncustomized? Vanilla? Upstream? IIRC Beeper has patched various things.

Different applications also supported different feature sets. Keeping up with ever newer supersets also stretched many players’ resources too much: https://alexalejandre.com/programming/xmpp-open-messaging-st...

> A more rigid core standard, actively keeping up with new technology may have delivered XMPP’s federated dream. In reality, each sever supported a different feature set, while lacking common features every other chat app offered. As mobile technology transformed, XMPP stayed still. Pidgin worked on Google Talk, before an XEP brought (necessary) OIDC authentification and those 3rd-party clients couldn’t keep up.

Well, most countries have a single instant messaging app (usually WhatsApp) that's dominant now so there's no big need for it I guess.

But dominant doesn't mean it's the only one... most of my friends are on WhatsApp, but I use iMessage to talk to my wife (unless it's a group of friends then it's back to WhatsApp), apart from one or two friends who aren't o ln WhatsApp and then I use FB messenger... we have one gaming group with one guy not on FB and one guy not on WhatsApp, so I'm the meatware bridge between them.

And then I have people who only use Discord...

> most of my friends are on WhatsApp, but I use iMessage to talk to my wife [...] apart from one or two friends who aren't o ln WhatsApp [...]

As shown in a more visual way: https://xkcd.com/1810/

> But dominant doesn't mean it's the only one

It often does. Check out these statistics:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311229/whatsapp-usage-m...

This is likely a huge underestimate too. They put UK at 71% but in practice it's used by everyone. You'd be a weirdo not to have WhatsApp in the UK, like not owning a smartphone.

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